From one William to another. William Hogarth’s engravings are the basis for another of this week’s highlighted shows. Theatre company simple8′s builds a play around Tom Nero, Hogarth’s orphaned protagonist. In The Four Stages of Cruelty, nine actors create the swirl of life, death, crime, love and cruelty that Nero encounters on his rise from poor orphan to notorious criminal. Look out for live music, period cant, physical ingenuity and an array of characters in a story that plunges a corkscrew into the city’s social bedrock, taking in the Hackney carriages, gin halls, boxing bouts and masquerades of 18th-century London.

This week’s casting news comes for two very different shows. Firstly, actor, singer and presenter Jonathan Wilkes is joining the cast of musical Chicago as Billy Flynn for a seven-week run from next week. Secondly, casting has been announced for the world premier of Tactical Questioning at the Tricycle Theatre from 2 June.

Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry brings together stories from the Public Inquiry which examined those two days of detention and the British Army’s treatment of detainees. The Tricycle’s production is staged following the oral hearings completed in October last year and before Sir William Gage publishes his final report and recommendations this summer. 

The Tactical Questioning cast includes:

• Dean Ashton
• Christopher Fox
• Luke Harris
• David Michaels
• Alan Parnaby
• Simon Rouse
• Mark Stobbart
• Rick Warden
• Thomas Wheatley

Finally, Ghost Stories will scare theatregoers for the last time next month: I’ve had an announcement that it’s closing on 19 June. The show had been booking until 1 October, but will close early: book now if you want to witness what caused the show’s producers to warn of “moments of extreme shock and tension”.

Here’s a great little video from our friends at Urban Telly, all about Halloween in London.

Attractions and key places to visit in the video include:

• The Blind Beggar in Whitechapel
• The London Bridge Experience
• Wicked Day at St Pancras International
• Ghost Stories at the Duke of York’s Theatre
• London Canal Museum

The Woman in Black is currently celebrating its 21st year in London’s West End; the rather dingy building and dangerously intimate Fortune Theatre has become its home. The performance combines theatrical illusion and trickery with a disturbing narrative, scaring even the coolest of hearts.

Ghost Stories was written only recently and is more contemporary in every way. The production feels more like an experiment in fear, presenting archetypal myths and using clever technology to make them come alive. As you take your seat, there is no light or programme sellers to welcome you in, instead the dimly lit Duke of Yorks Theatre is haunted with a soundtrack of drips and rumbles and eerie screeches. There is no interval, which builds up tension and you are warned: if you leave the theatre during the performance you will be unable to return.

What both shows have in common is a real talent for inducing terror through all the senses. Employing mostly sound and sight, but also touch and smell as scare tactics.  As for taste, I know I left both theatres with the taste of fear in my mouth.

More spooky shows to see in London:

• Phantom of the Opera: a masked man haunts the Paris Opera House in this well-loved musical
• Wicked: the tale of the Wicked Witch of the West
• Deathtrap: this onstage thriller plots the ideal murder and cuts close to the bone
• Alice Cooper: the grandaddy of shock rock comes to London’s Roundhouse for Halloween
• Terror 2010: Death and Resurrection: four scary short plays

Halloween is only a week away, so book your tickets to London’s scariest shows now!